Elite: Dangerous - Design Decision Forum

[Disembodied]

Allowing players can submit stories to the newsfeeds (these would need moderation) and would be a good way for adding variety and richness.

Sounds like Tales from the Spacelanes, does that! Thanks for the info, Gimi.

Interesting! I wonder if they've thought about making journalism into an in-game career option? Or at least of providing some in-game reward for writing material? It wouldn't have to be a huge financial reward or anything (although a few credits here and there wouldn't go amiss), but there could be rankings maybe ... even ship-fitted cameras, for a bit of photojournalism?

[Rorschachhamster]

...even ship-fitted cameras, for a bit of photojournalism?

Thingy that takes 10 pictures? Haven't I seen that before?
Maybe a "photo of the week" (or month) thread to be voted witch one(s) end(s) in the OXP?
EDIT:Oh, I know, but we can use ideas, can't we?

[Disembodied]

EDIT:Oh, I know, but we can use ideas, can't we?

No reason not to share the best of them ...

[Selezen]

Interesting! I wonder if they've thought about making journalism into an in-game career option? Or at least of providing some in-game reward for writing material? It wouldn't have to be a huge financial reward or anything (although a few credits here and there wouldn't go amiss), but there could be rankings maybe ... even ship-fitted cameras, for a bit of photojournalism?

I did suggest exactly that in the topic, fifth post, I think.

Taking photos as part of a mission was in Frontier, so the precedence is set. Just point them in a different direction and photojournalism (and a lucrative sideline in astronomy photography) is born!

[Cody]

What's the state of play re this 'points of interest' thingy? Has anything been decided?

[Selezen]

Next topic: Comms!

"We have clearance, Clarence" "Roger, Roger" Comms in Elite: Dangerous

Its that time again!
This proposal covers communication interaction, both player to player and player to NPC. This topic is very open to ideas and opinions so fire away!

Summary

• Ships in the Elite Dangerous galaxy communicate through text “comms” messages.
• These can be quick messages granting permission to dock, or long exchanges debating a mission or deal.
• There will be two types of communication interaction in the game: player to player and player to NPC.

Player to Player

• Players can lock onto and hail any other player’s ship that is not ignoring them
• They have three ways of communicating:
  • They can choose to type messages to each other freely
  • Voice chat
  • Preconfigured messages
    • These will cover all common interactions between players like asking for assistance, offering trade and declaring piracy
    • These will allow players to carry out deals and agreements quickly and easily by picking presets
    • New preset options will arise from having higher reputation values in certain areas

Player to NPC

• Talking to NPC would be handled entirely by the preset messages system.
• Conversations happen either when the player hails an NPC and they respond and vice versa
• Players will choose from a number of options and the NPC will automatically respond, they will take reputation into account when deciding their response.
  • Reputations can also affect the general tone of interaction with a particular type of NPC, a trader being hostile to a pirate for example.
  • New conversation options can become open to the player as their reputation values change, this could include options to bluff, bribe and haggle.
• Choices made in these interactions will have real consequences for gameplay, each choice could have a different outcome in terms of gameplay.

Issues

Broadcasting

• Do we need to support the ability to broadcast/communicate to a number of other players simultaneously? We want to avoid the text based chat channels spamming that most other games have, are there any ways you guys can think of by which players can communicate without text? So far we’ve come up with distress beacons and posting of shared waypoints, both visual and both allow players to broadcast gameplay related information without the need for text. Any ideas on this welcome!

Abusive Language

• We need to work out whether it is necessary/worthwhile to have some sort abusive language filter for text messages sent to other player. (This would be on the receiver’s end and would be toggleable in the options menu)
• Do players need to grant permission before voice chat is transmitted?

[/color]

[Gimi]

What's the state of play re this 'points of interest' thingy? Has anything been decided?

Are you referring to the "in system travel" topic where they suggested using points of interest and automated flight?
If so, that discussion culminated in 17 polls covering various aspects of in system travel aiming to chart out how the players wanted the game to work. Polls are now closed, but no update has been posted. The proposal presented by FD triggered quite a big discussion and I think FD are now reviewing what is technically possible within the constraints they have and where they want to go with this.

[Cody]

Thanks, Gimi... that is indeed what I was referring to.

[Gimi]

"We can smell the money, over." Revised Trading in Elite: Dangerous

Revised trading proposal from Frontier Developments

Hi Guys, here we have the revised version of the Trading proposal, take a look and scrutinize some more!
Goals

• Simple to use – the actual mechanisms of trading should be easy for the player to grasp. The complexities in trading come from the choices that the player makes.
• Provide interesting choice – trading should provide the player with interesting, but understandable choices.
• Risk/Reward – trading is a risk vs. reward activity and should provide the opportunity for players to balance risk with potential rewards.
• Impact the game world – player actions should have a noticeable effect on the game world. They enable player choices to determine the fate of aspects of the galaxy.
• Advance the player – trading should provide the player with the opportunity to advance in the game by supporting the player credits loop
  • Credits in trading are earned by selling commodities at a higher price than they were purchased for
  • Earning credits allows the following interactions
    • Repair ship damage
    • Replace ship consumables
    • Pay fines
    • Purchase ship module upgrades
    • Purchase additional ships
    • Buy more commodities, continuing a trade credit loop
    • Purchase information
    • Ship maintenance
    • Other activities to be added in future releases

Markets

• Markets are where the majority of trading takes place
  • They can be space stations, very large ships, or any other suitable structure
  • Markets come in a variety of types which determine which goods can potentially be present
    • Space Stations – trades commodities and essential ship supplies
    • Shipyards – trades limited commodities, ships, ship modules, ship supplies
    • Factories – Specialist markets for particular commodities.
    • Black Markets – private markets accessible based on player reputation, trades illegal commodities, requires contact to access, can be part of a legal market.
    • Pirate Bases – ignore fines and bounties, commodities, trades illegal commodities, requires contact to locate
    • Smuggler Bases – ignores fines, but not bounties, trades illegal commodities only, requires contact for location.
• The background simulation determines some properties of a market
  • Available commodities of allowed types
  • Quantities of commodities present
  • What commodities can be sold at the market
  • The quantities of what can be sold in the market
  • Commodity price modifications (Purchase & sale prices)
• Some markets will be indicated as special in some way. This usually means the availability of rare items.
• Price modification by players
  • Players can attempt to change the offered price (for buy and sale)
    • Success is determined by a dice roll based on the amount of variance and the player’s ranking/reputation
• Freight missions available from markets for transporting goods for a reward
  • Missions to be discussed in detail in future topics
  • Although a reasonable spread of missions will always be available
• To determine a market’s properties the background simulation takes into account the following system data:
  • Supply and demand based on market location, e.g.
    • Agricultural location
      • Supplies Food
      • Demands Machinery, Fertiliser
  • Politics/laws
    • Determines which commodities are illegal
  • Population size and standard of living
    • Increases supply and demand of specific commodities
  • Meta events like conflicts and disasters
    • Affects commodity availability and prices
    • Can be generated by player actions
  • Player trading in the system
• Market data availability
  • When docked all available market data is available
    • This may be modified by ranking
  • When in system market prices are available
  • Outside the system only general information is available
  • Player’s trade history is available in detail
  • Newsfeeds provide useful economic data for all systems
• Market Data Content
  • Historical data will be aggregated
  • Full price data for limited time
  • Then aggregated for full timeline

Commodities

• There is a list of different commodities
  • Each commodity has a baseline price
    • This is the starting price for the commodity in this market
    • This price is modified by background simulation
    • This price is modified by player trading
    • Buy and selling price is modified by the quantity of a commodity being traded
      • Repeated sales of the same commodity by the same player in the same market will be blocked
    • There are caps on prices to prevent unrealistic extremes (no negative values)
  • Based on background simulation data, rare alternate commodities can be generated
    • These commodities’ value increase the further the player is from the origin system
      • Value rarity modifiers are capped
  • Quantities of commodities that are purchased are limited by the player’s currently active ship’s cargo capacity.
  • Modules can be traded (although not when equipped)
  • Some commodities require specialist ship equipment
    • Attempting to transport commodities of these types without said equipment has effects:
      • Spoiling – the commodity is ruined
      • Alteration – the commodity changes type
      • Contamination – the commodity becomes hazardous
  • Packets of information can be obtained and traded like commodities
    • Tradable information includes:
      • System locations
      • Market locations
      • Resource gathering locations
      • Mission/event locations
    • Information packets automatically update the player’s galactic map as needed when they are acquired
    • Using a purchased packet means it cannot then be resold

Player to Player Trading

• Players can trade directly with each other
  • The player trade interface is available when both players are docked at the same market
  • The player trade interface is available when two players dock ships
• The player trade interface is a secure swap allowing players to transfer credits/cargo
  • Both players must accept the trade before it occurs
    • Acceptance must be redone by both parties after any change in the trade
  • Trading occurs in real-time and can be interrupted (for example by being attacked) unless unless taking place at a space dock
  • Either player can transfer the trade at any time

Issues

• Synchronous transactions
  • If this occurs, the first transaction to be seen by the server is accepted and the other rejected
• Player trading effect – There are a few issues that have been highlighted in this area and will need further examination
  • Game start exploits
    • Creating characters introduces money into the system
      • Provide checks to prevent spamming of new characters?
      • Limit repeated trades?
        • By reputation?
  • Real world purchases of commodities
    • Disallow gifting or significant underselling?
    • Statistical analysis to identify problem playes?
    • Clamp min/max prices for P2P transactions based on local market?
    • Min/Max values can be influenced by player reputation?
    • Limit transaction sizes (by value and volume)?
      • Credit transfers
        • Disallow credit transfers?

Useful Headings:
Markets
Commodities
P2P Trades
Background Sim
Market Location [/color]

[Gimi]

"There is no spoon" Background Simulation in Elite: Dangerous

Next topic in the DDF, background simulation.

Enjoy!

Goals
The goals of the background simulation are as follows:

• Politics
  • Create a dynamic, evolving galaxy
  • Generate interesting events
  • These can then be used to create missions
  • Respond to player activities
  • Player activities should have greater impact
  • Respond to injected events
  • Respond to generated events (chain effect)
• Economy
  • Create a dynamic economy
  • Populate markets (quantities and prices)
  • Be relatively predictable (to aid player understanding)
  • Generate interesting events
  • These events can be used to create missions
  • Respond to player activities
  • Player activities should have greater impact
  • Respond to injected events
  • Respond to generated effects (chain effects)

The requirements for both the political and economic simulations are similar, potentially similar enough that they can be driven by the same system, which is something we will explore with this design.

From a technical perspective the following goals are also required:

• Low overhead for processing
• Low overhead for data storage
• Low data access requirements

What the simulation is not

• It does not provide faction command, this will be done by designers by injecting events.
  • Although the system should provide aggregated data to help guide these events.
• It does not provide a fine detailed simulation of human space in the galaxy.
  • Note that it does provide the framework for a living galaxy as required in the goals.

What defines a simulation entity
A simulation entity is the lowest unit to which the simulation applies, this will typically mean a system or a world within a system. Note that an entity can support multiple markets.

An entity has a number of variables. Each of those variables defines what events the simulation creates.

• Government type
  • The government type is one of a list of predetermined types. The types apply a range of modifiers to the base values for system. For example communism, or democracy. The list of government types is listed below:
    • None
    • Anarchy
    • Commune
    • Communism
    • Corporate
    • Cult
    • Democracy
    • Dictatorship
    • Federation Democracy
    • Imperial Republic

• Economy type
  • The economy type is a broad indication of the primary income generation for the system. This usually reflects what the main exports are. They also determine
    • what items are generally available in the markets.
    • Agricultural
    • Industrial
    • Mineral
    • Service

• Population
  • The population size of a planet is used to measure the effects of changes or player activities. It is also used to modify the availability of items in associated markets.

• Development Level
  • This a broad indicator for how advanced the colony is. It provides modifiers for the various variables of the entity. In a broad sense it is an indicator of how well the entity can absorb change, shortfalls and so forth. It also represents the entities ability to support itself through contact via other entities.

• Standard of Living (SOL)
  • The standard of living variable indicates how good life is for the average member of the entity’s population. A high standard of living requires adequate essentials (such as food) as well as luxury items. This will also affect the availability (and demand) for such items in the markets.
  • A low SOL indicates a poor standard of living for the population, in situations with low stocks of essentials like food this indicates an event like a famine.
  • Manipulation of the markets either directly through trade or indirectly by blockade will change the SOL appropriately.

• Security
  • The security value represents the security situation for the entity. The higher the value, the more secure the population feels and vice versa.
  • The security value can be modified by direct player action, acts of piracy will lower the security while bounty hunting will increase it.

• Wealth
  • The wealth variable indicates the accumulated wealth of the entity. The entity can use its wealth to generate events to boost its other values and as such acts as a cushion for negative changes. It also indicates the strength of the economy and feeds into prices.
  • Note the while SOL and wealth are connected, they are not the same thing.
  • Players can influence wealth in a number of ways, generous trading will increase wealth, while reducing profit margins for the locals will reduce wealth. Destroying entity assets will impact on wealth, and influencing security and SOL will also have a knock on effect.

Bi-Modal Simulation Tick
The simulation runs in two distinct modes (although the evaluation of each mode generates the same events). The first is based on player activities, once an activity type reaches a threshold for the entity, the impact is applied and any events generated.

As well as player effects we also want periodic change driven by the simulation itself.

Player Activity Thresholds
Player activities within the associated volume for the entity are tallied into various influences. These influences have a direct effect on the entity’s stats. The tracked activities are as follows:

• Development level
  • Negative impact
    • Failed development missions
  • Positive impact
    • Completed development missions

• Standard of Living
  • Negative impact
    • Failed standard of living missions
  • Positive impact
    • Completed standard of living missions
    • Completed trades that add to the entity’s essential goods

• Security
  • Negative impact
    • Piracy
    • Murder
    • Failed security missions
  • Positive impact
    • Bounties collected
    • Completed security missions

• Wealth
  • Negative impact
    • Issuing missions
    • Losses made on trade by entity
  • Positive impact
    • Profits made by entity

Thresholds for the activities are set depending on the entity’s population, development level and modifiers from government types as applicable. A count for each activity is maintained; note that it is the net between positive and negative actions that is used to determine any change. Missions are weighted more heavily in the count than general actions. Once the net effect reaches the threshold value then an event is generated. The activity counts are reset and the threshold value recalculated based on the new statistics if needed.

Note that wealth is not a triggered threshold, but is included as it does change depending on circumstances and is required for generating remedial missions.

Generated Events
When a threshold has been triggered then the entity creates an event, this is typically a mission designed to address the problem, although this will cost the entity some of its wealth. If the entity has no wealth then an event cannot be created, however a message will be generated for the monitoring developers (see intervention triggers).

Periodic change can also create events.

The government type determines whether an event should be generated for the triggered threshold.

If the government type allows it then an event (and associated mission) is generated. These will follow the same pattern as the activity thresholds list, so for example a bounty hunter mission will be generated if the security variable is reduced.

Periodic Change
The periodic development of entities is handled by a periodic scan of each entity. The entity’s variables are analysed and adjustments made. If any changes change a value across a given minimum then an event is created in the same way as if an activity threshold was crossed.

Faction Support
For entities that belong to a faction (the Alliance, Federation and Empire) there is a safety net provided by those factions. When an entity attempts to generate an event and lacks the wealth to do so it uses its faction’s lookup table to generate a faction event for the event type.

For example an Imperial system has been plagued with pirates; it has issued missions which no player has completed. This cycle continues, with more player pirates pushing the entity into a downward spiral. Eventually it is no longer able to generate missions and so receives a faction support event. This is an Imperial task force of a cruiser with several squadrons of fighters. These suppress the pirates and order is restored.

Government Collapse
When an entity attempts to issue an event and cannot (and it doesn’t have faction support) then the entity’s government collapses and is set to none.

Injected Events and Intervention
Events that affect entities can be injected into the game that can directly change an entity’s statistics. This mechanism can be used to add specific events to the game, like civil wars, economic collapse and major story items.

Intervention messages are a failsafe in the system. When an entity’s stats reach set levels (a minimum and a maximum) a message is sent to whoever is monitoring the galaxy highlighting possible collapse or expansion opportunities. They can then be used to manually add events as desired.

Markets and Trading
Each entity can have one or more markets. A market is defined as a place where the player trades with NPC’s. Typically this will be at space stations, ship yards, pirate and smuggler bases. The entity defines what commodities are available and their prices, although the markets will also modify these.

As with the political events, economic events occur in a bi-modal tick. The periodic method is a check of the entity’s markets and any adjustments made. The other method is the threshold system of players trades that works in a similar fashion to the player activity thresholds.

Calculating base prices
Base prices are initially calculated as a function of economy type, government type, development level and population.

For example a largely populated agricultural world with a high development level would have cheaper food prices than an equivalent industrial world.

Prices have a universal minimum and maximum price cap to prevent catastrophic price failures and exploits.

Rare Goods
Entities which have a sufficiently high development level may start creating rare goods based on their primary economic output, e.g. an agri-world could generate a rare foodstuff.

Periodic Market Analysis
On a periodic basis (daily) the market for each entity is analysed and updated depending upon the analysis. This analysis is performed before the political simulation so that any economic changes are taken into account.
The major components of that analysis are as follows:

• Restock markets
  • The markets for the entity are restocked according to the type of market, the commodities that the entity produces (these are also affected by the development level, government and economy types).
  • There are caps to the maximum capacity for each commodity determined by the market type. Larger stations can hold more goods for sale. These caps also limit player sales, so if a market is already full of food, no more food can sold to that market.
  • Note that the restock quantities are representative (scaled by population size and development level). We do not have an agricultural world producing a million tons of food per day.

• Calculate wealth adjustment
  • The current trade for the system is calculated and the net effect is applied to the entity’s wealth.

• Standard of Living (SOL)
  • The entities standard of living is processed, quantities of essential goods are removed from the markets. The removed quantities are representative values scaled by population and development level, we are not modelling planetary scale use of commodities.
  • Commodities are grouped for essentials and luxuries. If there is a shortfall then the SOL is reduced appropriately. Surpluses of essentials will increase SOL, but only to a maximum of 50%. Shortfalls of luxury items reduce SOL, but to a minimum of 50%. Surpluses of luxury items increase the SOL, but only if the SOL is at 50% or higher.

• Recalculate prices
  • For the remaining quantities of each commodity a new price is calculated, based on a ratio determined by a lookup table from the price at the beginning of the analysis process. For example if the commodity now has a stock level of 50% higher, the price per unit will drop by 25%.

• Reset trace counters
  • The accumulated counters for the trade thresholds are all reset.

• Reset thresholds
  • The thresholds for each commodity are reset depending on the updated stock levels.

Market Thresholds
In the same way the political events are triggered by player activity thresholds, price and stock changes are triggered by player trades.

For stock availability this correlation is direct to the trade, so purchasing 100 units reduces the stock level by 100 units and vice versa.

Prices are not quite as volatile as stock levels, they require accumulated trades to trigger price changes.

For each commodity the entity creates a threshold level for price increases and drops. The threshold is determined using the entity’s economy type, government type and development level. The unit quantity for each trade is applied to the relevant counter for each commodity, when the counter reaches the threshold for a change the change is triggered.

Inflation
The economy is not a balanced system of checks and balances, but a system of causes being used to generate effects. As such there is a danger of inflation (where players accumulate so much money that it is effectively devalued).

This issue can only be completely eradicated if money is destroyed in the same quantity that is being created. As the game is focused on positive effects (from the player’s perspective), with only some negative effects, this is not an achieveable goals.

To combat inflation there needs to be suitable money sinks that the player spends money on reducing the cash in the player economy.

It should be noted that players getting richer is not the same as inflation and is desirable. However we should ensure that at all times there are interesting spend choices.

[/color]

[cim]

The list of government types is listed below:

• None
• Anarchy
• Commune
• Communism
• Corporate
• Cult
• Democracy
• Dictatorship
• Federation Democracy
• Imperial Republic

What, no Feudal? (I suppose Dictatorship and Corporate have it covered)

Multigov and Confederacy presumably come out automatically just by making the simulated units smaller in that system, which is a nice way to do it.

Fallback to "none" in case of governmental collapse implies a much less stereotypical treatment of "anarchy" than I was expecting. Interesting...

For example an Imperial system has been plagued with pirates; it has issued missions which no player has completed. This cycle continues, with more player pirates pushing the entity into a downward spiral. Eventually it is no longer able to generate missions and so receives a faction support event. This is an Imperial task force of a cruiser with several squadrons of fighters. These suppress the pirates and order is restored.

There's optimism for you...

Question: does the faction have a limited budget for event generation? If it does, then there's at least theoretical scope for waging sufficient warfare (piracy, economic, etc.) that they can't send task forces to all their colonies at once. If it doesn't, then it gives an interesting contrast between factional systems (which can't be more than temporarily disrupted) and independent systems (which could end up completely trashed). I guess in practice the budgetary limit is likely to be "speed of plot".

Inflation
The economy is not a balanced system of checks and balances, but a system of causes being used to generate effects. As such there is a danger of inflation (where players accumulate so much money that it is effectively devalued).
[...]
To combat inflation there needs to be suitable money sinks that the player spends money on reducing the cash in the player economy.

It's worth noting here that if they mean actual inflation - prices for goods and equipment rising over time, so that missile which used to cost 30 credits now costs 35 credits - that the major purpose of inflation in a modern economy is to make it undesirable to hoard cash. If money which you just have sitting around in your account is slowly eroding in value, you're more likely to spend it on interesting money sinks (and/or invest it in projects with an expected return higher than the inflation rate, like "buying a military laser"). In that case the starting player's credit balance would have to rise in line with inflation, of course.

If they just mean that the players are getting richer overall and no-one buys the 30 credit missiles because the 350 credit missiles are more effective and the price difference isn't meaningful, that's not inflation (unless you use the rather idiosyncratic definition of the Austrian economists) but it could be solved with a bit of inflation...

[Disembodied]

It's worth noting here that if they mean actual inflation - prices for goods and equipment rising over time, so that missile which used to cost 30 credits now costs 35 credits - that the major purpose of inflation in a modern economy is to make it undesirable to hoard cash. If money which you just have sitting around in your account is slowly eroding in value, you're more likely to spend it on interesting money sinks (and/or invest it in projects with an expected return higher than the inflation rate, like "buying a military laser"). In that case the starting player's credit balance would have to rise in line with inflation, of course.

Is there really a purpose to inflation? Or is that just one of the effects? Nobody actually seeks to create inflation, do they? It's not like anyone seems to have a rip-snorting success in deliberately creating any other economic effect ... Prices tend to rise overall because (I assume - IANAE) people are quicker to put prices up when they can (or when they have to, to maintain profitability) than they are to take them back down again. Because everybody's doing that, everybody's prices tend to rise all along the supply chain, which means wages have to rise, which increases everybody's costs again, and so on.

If they just mean that the players are getting richer overall and no-one buys the 30 credit missiles because the 350 credit missiles are more effective and the price difference isn't meaningful, that's not inflation (unless you use the rather idiosyncratic definition of the Austrian economists) but it could be solved with a bit of inflation...

Or the inflation could be produced by a restriction in the supply. If everyone's buying Cr350 missiles, unless there's an effectively infinite supply, they'll start to run out. Which will make them rarer, which will mean that people will be prepared to pay more for them, which *should* mean that they begin to rise in price - until the price differential hits a point where it does start to matter and then the Cr30 missiles begin to look like a better deal to most pilots.

[Commander McLane]

It's worth noting here that if they mean actual inflation - prices for goods and equipment rising over time, so that missile which used to cost 30 credits now costs 35 credits - that the major purpose of inflation in a modern economy is to make it undesirable to hoard cash. If money which you just have sitting around in your account is slowly eroding in value, you're more likely to spend it on interesting money sinks (and/or invest it in projects with an expected return higher than the inflation rate, like "buying a military laser"). In that case the starting player's credit balance would have to rise in line with inflation, of course.

Is there really a purpose to inflation? Or is that just one of the effects? Nobody actually seeks to create inflation, do they?

Depending on which economic theory you adhere to, there is indeed the purpose described by cim. For instance, European monetary policy aims for an inflation > 0, something in the range of 1.5-2% seems to be deemed good. This is also to prevent veering into deflation, which is macro-economically just as harmful as a huge inflation, if not more. The reasoning is that if prices were actually falling, nobody would buy anything anymore, but everybody would keep their money and wait until the prices have fallen even more. The result would be an economic standstill. By the same reasoning, a little inflation is actually good, because it makes people want to spend their money rather now than tomorrow, thereby keeping the money in the cycle and the economy afloat.

[cim]

Is there really a purpose to inflation? Or is that just one of the effects? Nobody actually seeks to create inflation, do they?

Yes, in modern economies. A couple of percent of inflation stops really rich people preferentially hanging on to money, which means they spend it on things of at least some economic benefit (whether investing for a return on business loans, or buying luxuries that need producing and therefore transferring the money to other people)

Stability would probably work reasonably well for this too, since the motivation of having more wealth would probably still cause people to invest - but the problem is that even tiny amounts of deflation can cause serious problems: 2% inflation is not a problem, but 2% deflation is extremely serious, because you can get an effective 2% return on investment from hanging on to the money. That causes more people to hang on to money, which means there's less money in circulation, which means that prices fall further, which makes investment projects less viable, which means that there's even less around that's better than hanging on to the money, locking in the deflation and causing the economy to grind to a halt (as happened in Japan recently, for instance)

So a little bit of planned inflation gives a cushion against dropping into a deflationary spiral and encourages spending. The Bank of England has a target of 2% inflation (+/-1%), for instance. I think the US and EU equivalents have similar. (I suspect Elite Dangerous might need a rather higher inflation target, if credits are as easy to make as they were in the previous games)

Or the inflation could be produced by a restriction in the supply. If everyone's buying Cr350 missiles, unless there's an effectively infinite supply, they'll start to run out. Which will make them rarer, which will mean that people will be prepared to pay more for them, which *should* mean that they begin to rise in price - until the price differential hits a point where it does start to matter and then the Cr30 missiles begin to look like a better deal to most pilots.

Indeed. Of course, there's also the opposite risk, in which the expensive missiles end up rising too rapidly in price, and "buy missiles to sell later rather than to fire" becomes an apparently good investment. Lots of people lost a lot of money when the naval missile bubble burst... I say "risk". Actually, that sounds like it could be quite fun, so long as it didn't happen too often, or get in the way of the average player equipping their ship.

[Disembodied]

Interesting! Although I wonder if people actually produce it deliberately, or if it just happens ... it might be like a priesthood setting policy, via a bit of human sacrifice, that spring should come around after winter. "See! We did that! That was us. Now, make with the tithes ..."

Of course, there's also the opposite risk, in which the expensive missiles end up rising too rapidly in price, and "buy missiles to sell later rather than to fire" becomes an apparently good investment. Lots of people lost a lot of money when the naval missile bubble burst... I say "risk". Actually, that sounds like it could be quite fun, so long as it didn't happen too often, or get in the way of the average player equipping their ship.

Yes, that could be entertaining ... for equipment (weapons, especially) it should really only happen in periods of stress, like significant pirate raids or something. Plus it would depend too on the player's ability to hoard equipment.